.|. COHERENT COMICS UNINCORPORATED ---X------------------------------------------------------------------------- '|` PRESENTS DVANDOM FORCE #46 XXXX XXXX ##### XXXX XXXX ###### XXXX XXXX ####### XXXX XXXX ##### XXXXXXX ____ ___ ___ _____ ##### XXXX #### |___) | | |___ | ##### XXXXXXX #### | | | | | ##### XXXX XXXX | `___' ___' | ##### XXXX XXXX ____ __ ___ _____ ___ ##### XXX XXXX |__ |_\ | | | | ##### X XXXX | | \ | | | | ##### XXXX | | \ `___ | `___' ######### ######### copyright 1995 by Dave Van Domelen ============================================================================= [cover portrays the Earth cradled firmly by a pair of robotic hands. The positioning is possessive, but not destructive.] ============================================================================= In the forbidden vids he'd seen, the rebels in a totalitarian future society are always skulking down some dark alley or another, desperately trying to avoid detection on their way to some neglected sector of town where the government was only a distant fear. Where criminals ruled the squalor and used the underpaid cops as enforcers. As Shane Boxer tried to look calm walking down the broad, clean street, he decided that scenario would be kinda nice. As it stood, all of Net.ropia was clean and orderly, all of it under the equally close eye of the WorldGov cops and...he shuddered...their Patrol Robos. There wasn't a criminal underclass to hide among, there wasn't an underclass at all in this craven new world. DeFacto V had slaughtered all the poor, the tired, the huddled masses yearning to breathe...period. Shane was one of the few people alive who even knew about that crime. Educating the children as to the true history of the world wasn't particularly conducive to maintaining public order, was it? Shane knew a large number of things that would drastically shorten his lifespan if the WorldGov found out he knew. Like what LNHQ stood for. The LNHQ was DeFacto's primary palace, his seat of power. It had been the home of the world's greatest heroes before DeFacto killed them all, but again, that wasn't exactly public knowledge. It was also where Shane had just been, on a mission for the world's only organized resistance group...Dvandomforce. He *didn't* know why it was called that, nor did he know more than a few others in the group. The cell structure was necessary against the inevitability of capture and Scanning. He suppressed a shudder at the idea of his mind being totally drained from his brain, then sifted through. Gotta look calm, he reminded himself. Especially given what he was carrying. Given how insanely illegal it was. All information was strictly regulated, none was to be used frivilously...the definition of frivilous being in a way that DeFacto didn't like. Hence, theft of information was perhaps the most grievous crime a citizen could commit. The fact that few people had the courage to commit any crime greater than that, such as shooting a cop, also kept it the big crime on the charts. And devices designed to, say, float inside the LNHQ and tap the databanks inside then return to their user's hand were *really* illegal. Like the one Shane had in his pocket. It was stealthy, able to slip past any passive scans. But it really couldn't reliably hide from.... "Excuse me, citizen. Your actions appear sufficiently unordered to arouse suspicion. Please stand where you are ans submit to a scan," ordered one of the five WGs standing between him and the tube station. Shane mentally cursed. No way he could make the tube now, they could just shut it off if he got past them. And if he stood there and let him scan him, they'd get the data for sure. And Dvandomforce NEEDED that data. He didn't know what it was or why they needed it, but he wasn't supposed to. He was fully expendable, and the theft was bound to be noticed within a day or less. So long as he got the capsule to his contact, he could be captured and Scanned and never reveal a thing. So he did the only thing he could. He bolted into the orderly crowd, hoping to put enough distance between himself and the WGs that he could send the capsule off and hope it was picked up by Dvandomforce instead of the WG. It was too slow and underpowered to evade capture on its own, so he had to stack the odds before being captured. Plus, if he could get rid of it before capture, they might not have enough dirt on him to merit Scanning. Shane was making good time through the crowd, sheeplike and unused to being rudely shoved around as they were. He dared a glance over his shoulder and saw that the WGs weren't making very good time, being too sheeplike themselves to break a lifetime of conditioning to be orderly. They were just sentry goons, they weren't smart enough or aggressive enough to catch a real InfoCrim like Shane. But the Special Group goons were, and the dozen or so of them waiting for him when he burst from the crowd at the tube station gave him pause. The sentries may be stupid, but they know to call for backup. And in a rigidly ordered society, backup comes with great speed and efficiency, unfortunately. The lead SG grinned sadistically. He was no sheep, he was a wolf at the head of his pack. SG members were selected from those too antisocial to be allowed in with the sheep, but not so bad they had to be killed. DeFacto's orders decreed they be sterilized that the traits might be removed more quickly from the gene pool, but as long as foxes like Shane existed, wolves would be needed to counter them. A somewhat hypocritical stance, but practical. Shane had the SGs' overconfidence on his side, plus the fact that he wasn't looking to beat them, just evade them. But they had good reason to be overconfident. Two rushed him, and while Shane's boot connected firmly with the first's head with a satisfying crunch, the second ducked Shane's hasty punch and grabbed him in a grip that told Shane these goons had been eating Steroid Crunchies with Marshmallows. He had about a half second before he would end up at the bottom of a pile of maladjusted flesh. He cursed and used his free hand to tap the pressure-sensitive patch over his Series Five Cyclo-heart, crying out as the energy swept through him. "DVANDOMFORCE!" Metal oozed out of his pores and covered his skin in an armored shell, building up over vital areas into thicker plating, which nanomachines brought out and connected various systems in the helmet which was forming over his face. A concentration of metal at his right hand grew into a plasma pulse cannon and his boots thickened up to accomodate thrusters. Setting the pulse cannon on low intensity, Shane fired a rapid stream of pulses, hosing down the Special Group troopers. The plasma was "cold," just hot enough that when the self-maintaining magnetic field around it burst on contact there would be enough energy to ignite the recombined hydrogen. The concussive force of the explosion was enough to stun most humans as well as singe them a little. Now Shane was in the deep stuff, though. His cover was well and truly blown, and the PatRobos would be closing in on him real soon now. Without his RoboVector, he might be able to disable a single Luger-class PatRobo, but he didn't want to test the theory. And he really did have to escape now...the spy eye was in his pocket, under the armor. He'd need a few seconds to power down and release the thing, he couldn't just let it go during a running fight and hope it was unnoticed. Firing his thrusters, he tore down the street, now largely cleared as all vehicles had been ordered to the curb to allow Special Group forces to travel more quickly. It must have almost been fun to be a criminal in the old days, Shane mused as he zoomed along, what with all the chaos you could sow among the citizens to cover an escape. Now it was like a maze game...could he find the way out of the city before all the exits were blocked off? He didn't even consider taking to the sky. Not only was he slow in the air compared to a true aircraft, if he left the streets he'd be a great target for missile fire which would otherwise be counterindicated inside Net.ropia. "HALT, INFOCRIM!" shouted the amplified voice of a Special Group command car driver behind him. Command cars being around meant Lugers were around.... ...the corner. Shane almost rammed into the leg of one before veering off. He got so close he could read the thing's 'name,' Gaston. Naming machines was a disordered practice, but Special Group got a lot of slack. The Luger drew its stun baton and charged it up. Shane was at a T-junction, one side blocked by the Luger, one side by the command car and the last by the Luger's support truck. Shane poured on the thrust and headed for the support truck, reasoning it had the smallest chance of stopping him. Then the second Luger, Otto, stepped from behind a building and fired its boltgun at him. Shane was thrown to the ground and the wind knocked out of him. The two Lugers strode towards him as troops poured out of the command car. He was totally boxed in. Then the support truck surged forward. What the Hell(R)? Shane's confusion deepened when the spotter in the passenger's seat was suddenly and forcibly ejected from the truck. "SERGEANT WRAY, STAND DOWN! THE SITUATION IS UNDER CONTROL!" came the voice from the command car. Apparently this was *not* being done under orders. Did the support goon want a kill for herself, or what? Then it dawned on him. The woman behind the wheel must be a mole, a fellow 'Forcer! He scrambled to his feet and grabbed the side of the truck as it passed him. No sooner had he gotten into the cab than the truck rammed into Gaston, knocking it into a building. "Kid," she snarled as she flipped switches to cut them off from the tracer net, "you'd better be carrying some real hot shit for Eagle to order me to blow my cover for you." "I guess I am...scammed it out of LNHQ itself, gotta be highly verboten. So, how are we gonna get out of here in a slow-moving truck without any weapons and with the entire Special Group on our collective butts?" "Wrong on three counts, kid. Count one, slow moving," she pressed a switch and half the truck seemed to blow off, like a skin being shed. Underneath it was a sleek battlewagon. "Count two, no weapons." The camoflage bits suddenly stopped moving at random and started to seek out Luger targets. Some exploded on contact, some sliced through armor, others dropped out of sight to seek foes Shane couldn't see. "Count three, the entire SG ain't on our butts. I've been preparing for this for months, I didn't really think I'd get out quietly...I was counting on having to worry about all my bunkmates wanting to blow me up real good. So I put a Babel Virus into their operating systems when I got the chance...I'd say about a third of them are currently ignoring operator input and trashing their buddies." "Fine. And I'm not 'kid,' the name's Shane Boxer." "Jan Wray. Uh-oh...better strap in, *Shane.* There's a cluster of heavies up ahead, military Robos I didn't get a chance to bollix. We're not gonna be able to outrun them." "Can this thing outfight 'em?" "Not in this config...but you're not the only one with the metal skin trick. I'm Series Seven, myself. DVANDOMFORCE!" she shouted as she touched her beltbuckle. As her body was covered in armor, Shane gasped. He'd heard rumors about the Series Seven implants from others in his cell, they nicknamed them DynaMasters, walking power sources capable of straining enough power from the ambient neutrino flow to run a huge RoboVector. So this truck must be.... "TRANSFORM!" Jan shouted, ejecting from the cab as the truck began to twist and contort. Shane realized why he'd been told to strap in...he'd never stayed inside his own RoboVector while it transformed, and now he had no desire to ever again. He could see glimpses of the Bokken-class Robos as his field of view spun madly, and he could see the 'Vector's hand reach out and grab Jan, who had hunched over and become a powerful dynamo. "DYNAMO ON!" shouted the far louder and deeper voice of the Robo as it slammed home its living power source in a cavity where its heart would be, if it were human. From inside the chest of the Robo, it was like watching a madly whirling "MTV" version of a battle, as his viewpoint jerked wildly whenever the Jan Wray commanded her RoboVector to dodge a blast or strike a Bokken. In seconds it was over and the Bokkens lay scattered about, their pilots drifting down on gliderpacks after ejecting. One hindrance of being a somewhat moral resistance was that they tried to avoid killing people, which meant pulling punches to give pilots a chance to eject...and risking not disabling the Robo. Then everything blurred as they took off at speeds fast enough to escape the missile defenses which had been mobilized. Jen's voice spoke from the dashboard. "Nothing on the screens I can't outrun. Joe and Cobra must be too far away from Net.ropia to respond. We've got orders to head for Eyrie, we can't trust to the normal chain of information passage now that our covers are both toast." Joe and Cobra. Perhaps the best pilots the Special Group had, they piloted two of the very few transforming Robos run by the SG. Faster than a data transmission over an empty line and nastier than the glitches on a tenth-generation vid, Shane had no desire to be stuck in a dogfight with them. Jan's 'Vector was fast, but no way it could match that duo's aerial skill and speed. It was a very nervous ride to the legendary Eyrie. * * * * To say Shane was a bit surprised when they got to Eyrie would be true. Of course, in a day of stress and shocks, this particular surprise was all but lose in the noise. One would think a place named Eyrie would be atop a mountain somewhere, or maybe be a floating fortress, concealed by clouds. Of course, that's what Eagle wanted people to think...those few who knew it existed, that is. Instead, they dove into the ocean and landed atop a small seafloor rise. An airlock of huge proportions opened and they entered the subterranean base. Shane, who had powered down once it became obvious they weren't going to get into combat again, was shown to a smallish room with attached bath and told to get some rest while Eagle decided what to do with him next. The spy eye was hustled off by a group of men in lab coats eager to tap the secrets Shane had almost died to obtain for them. After a hot shower, Shane changed into a jumpsuit hanging in the small closet. It was an odd feeling to actually wear a uniform boldly proclaiming his loyalties, and he spent a long moment examining the "DF" patch on his chest in the mirror. The terminal set into the wall was flashing with notice of a message having arrived for him. Touching the screen he called it up. "Report to the Central Hall," followed by some directions on how to get there. On arrival, he was shocked to see hundreds of men and women in Dvandomforce jumpsuits waiting for something. He knew in his head that even this force...even if all of them had Cyclo-heart implants...didn't stand a ghost of a chance against DeFacto's power. But still, his heart swelled with hope at seeing so many fellow rebels, after so long nearly alone in the fight. Counting Jan, the doctor who had installed his implants and his cell members, Shane had seen all of five other rebels before this in person. The number he saw on the news, paraded before the public before being executed, was a much larger number. Then a hush fell over the crowd. Someone was coming to the podium, but no one could see his face yet. The man stepped up to the podium and into the light, a hood concealing his face in shadow. When he pushed the hood back, many voices in the crowd gasped in horror, Shane's included. It was DeFacto V! But why weren't all the people panicking and running? Wait...something not quite right. Even when he chose to look human, the robotic tyrant always had a certain rigid perfection about his features. Total symmetry impossible for a normal human face. This was DeFacto's face, but imperfect. Human. The man lifted his arms for quiet, then spoke. "Calm yourselves, my loyal warriors. Many of you have never seen my bare face before, and understandably you're shocked. Those of you who have may not know the whole story. But I am Eagle, your leader. But in another time I had a different name, a name cursed as much in my time as DeFacto's is now. Perhaps more, since more people had the courage to curse. My true name is Richard Franklins, once known as the villainous Acton Lord. Right now data brought in by many of you from different parts of the world is being sifted through in an attempt to prevent DeFacto V from ever existing." An excited murmur ran through the crowd. "Please know, this may not work. It all hinges on whether DeFacto's creation was a Cosmically Important Moment. If it was, changing it will change all parallel times and we...as we know ourselves...will cease to exist. This whole cursed future will be averted. But if it was not Important in a cosmic sense, all we will accomplish is the creation of another divergent future... this one will continue to exist. And we may all die for our efforts. "In 1995, the man who would become DeFacto V was suffering from the side effects of his powers...he was a hero. Fool that I was, *knowing* what laid in his future because I *was* one of his futures, did nothing. I sat complacent in the knowledge that he, Sig.Lad, would soon become another version of me. I had not counted on the chance he'd find a cure...or on what the cure would do to him. Oh, it would have worked and restored his powers to him normally, but he was being bathed in Plotdevicium Radiation at the time, and the effects were far from what I'd anticipated. Where I had attracted the attention of a force of nature, of the corruption inherent in nature, when I was finally fully destabilized, that force was not there to join with Sig.Lad. For it was joined to me. Instead a far more dangerous force found him to be the perfect avatar. His first action was to slay his own friends, the Dvandom Force which inspired the name of this rebellion. His second was to seek me out, for I was always his most bitter foe. With his new power he destroyed the atoll which was once here, once my base of power. He then removed my own powers...whether by absorbing them into himself or blocking my access to them I have never found out...and hurled me into the timestream to float forever in the agony I had experienced once before. I do not know exactly what happened after that, but it took him almost no time to crush all possible resistance and conquer the world. "He slaughtered over nine-tenths of the world's population, all the poor and 'undesirables.' Most of you know that, which is why you refused to remain passive. By killing all who carried incurable diseases, he 'cured' the diseases. By killing all criminals and all soldiers he broke the backbone of humanity's will to resist. Within a generation, the vastly reduced population was firmly under his control, living in a 'utopia' of order and plenty. He then turned his attention to other times, other worlds, intent on extending his utopian order into infinity. Only because he spends so little time on this period could a rebellion even think of starting. And because most of humanity is happy with their safe, comfortable lives, there's no chance for a rebellion to start on its own. "But his manipulation of the timestream brought with it certain disordered effects he could not prevent, especially the few times he tried to influence the past. During one of these random events I was accidentally freed from my torment and found myself in the frigid wastes of Ant.alt.ica. This was five years ago, in 2072. Bereft of my powers, I nonetheless had my vast knowledge to fall back on. Simple facts of history I possessed made me dangerous to Sig.Lad, now calling himself DeFacto V. He had wanted a name that would inspire terror, and didn't care that someone else had already been using it. My guess is that as he improved upon his now-robotic body he changed his name to reflect upgrades. This makes him more powerful than when he casually destroyed all the net.heroes and villains in one day...or at least he wants us to think so. "But history wasn't the only dangerous knowledge I had. I knew of the GradWarrens, which had not been destroyed by DeFacto...they were orderly enough to meet his approval. And through them I found you...the disaffected, the infocriminals, the *rebels*. With the help of the GradGnomes, I developed sciences I had stolen from a far future race of conscious robots...sciences DeFacto also had employed to create his Robo forces. The Cyclo-heart implants and RoboVectors, as well as Infiltrator "shells," gave us the power to have a chance...if only a slim one...of defeating DeFacto's regime." A tech hurried up to the podium and handed Acton Lord a message as the villain-turned-rebel-leader paused to let his words sink in. "We have little time," Acton Lord said by way of preamble. "Enough of you have converged on the Eyrie in the last day to reveal its location...of that I have no doubt. Time travel is the obvious answer to defeating DeFacto, but he is total master of the timestream in this era. We have found a way around this, by projecting the mind of one of you back in time to that fateful day in 1995. It will enter the body of one of your ancestors and hopefully be able to prevent this future from coming to pass. Many of you have collected data for me today...much of it is data once contained in my own computers, surveillance records of Dvandom Force's base and the LNHQ for that day. We have found a man related to one of you who was close enough to Sig.Lad to have a chance of stopping him. Shane Boxer, please follow me to the inner sanctum, you are to be our agent of justice. The rest of you, find your RoboVectors and prepare to defend this place with your dying breath...for if we fail, you will die anyway. If we succeed, you will never have been born...." * * * * Shane stood in a column of glowing mist wearing a plain white bodysuit while all around him techs frantically worked controls. He heard distant rumblings from above the deep chamber...the attack had begun. He recited over and over in his mind the facts he needed to carry with him. Stop Sig.Lad from becoming DeFacto V. Make him take off the plotdevicum before attempting any cure. Prevent this future from coming to pass. Suddenly the roof of the cavern was lifted off by a massive claw! Shane looked up to see DeFacto's personal Robo, the Black Widow, tearing away at the roof of basalt with its many arms. Panic filled the room as boulders and laser bolts showered down on the techs. Then everything flashed brilliantly blue and Shane Boxer's mind was gone, back into last issue, where we already know what happened. And John Q. Smith of 4201 Nettersly was *VERY* surprised to see a giant spider robot reaching for him.... ============================================================================= NEXT ISSUE: The rebellion has failed and the rebels captured. DeFacto V has a surprise family reunion with his "brother." And John Smith confuses the heck out of the interrogators in X-POST FACTO PART TWO!